Abductions and the Paranormal: A Worldview Challenge

Abductions and the Paranormal: A Worldview Challenge

By Daniel Neiman

You wake up paralyzed in bed and see a grey alien who points some luminous object at you which causes your body to go numb. Quickly thereafter, you seem to begin floating in the air. The alien being and yourself then go through the wall and float up into the sky where there is a waiting craft. You are examined on a table and feel as if your brain is taken out and re-inserted. You wake up the next day with new profound thoughts about the nature of the universe, God, and life—thoughts that had never occurred to you before. Also, you notice a fresh scar where a needle was inserted into you during the examination.

How would you interpret such an occurrence? Well, the right answer is that it depends on your metaphysical disposition. Are you an atheist? Are you a Christian? Are you a new ager? Your answer will determine how you interpret the above scenario. An atheist would call it a strange sleep paralysis episode involving vivid hallucinations or maybe even a lucid dream. A Christian might think he had encountered actual angels or demons, while a new ager might interpret it as being abducted by aliens from outer space.

I’m going to focus on the atheistic interpretation because that’s the one touted by science and the one which I am in strict opposition to.

Materialists and atheists like to reduce the mind to brain function. So, when there is an experience, like an abduction, with absurd elements of floating through walls and joy riding in a space-ship, their automatic disposition is to explain it based on aberrant brain function. The assumption is that some brain events represent actual reality, while other brain firing patterns produce hallucinatory experiences. In other words, some neural firing patterns are a result of accurate stimuli from the environment and can be said to represent real events, while other neural firing patterns are somehow not the result of stimuli from the actual world, but false mental imaginings called hallucinations. There is no actual basis for the hallucinations. They are simply creative constructions of the mind based on no external stimuli, but maybe borrowed elements from memory.

Since a lot of abductees recover memories via hypnosis, it is assumed that the hypnotist is leading them and they are fantasizing their abduction encounter. However, this explanation ignores those incidents when information obtained in an altered state of consciousness can be verified after the fact, suggesting of course that it’s not always a process of fantasizing.1

It also ignores the fact that most abductees have some conscious memories which cause them to want to undergo hypnosis in the first place, in order to learn more about strange incidents in their life involving missing time, mysterious scars, or seeing an alien being. Hypnosis is simply a way to relax and enter a deeper level of mind where memory is more accessible. Fantasized elements may enter into the equation, but shouldn’t be assumed to be the basis for the entire recall.

The mind is a multi-layered entity and it’s useful to understand how it works. No one really knows the ins and outs of mental processes. Many, though, postulate a three layer system of conscious mind, subconscious mind, and superconscious mind. (Jokingly, but also seriously, I think it’s more accurate to say conscious, superconscious, and super-duperconscious since the subconscious is actually a higher/deeper level of mind) The conscious mind is the rational logical, evaluating mind we use to think and act in the physical world. The subconscious mind is the realm of memories, emotions, intuition, and imagination. The superconscious is the collective conscious where all things are One. We could call this Source Mind, or the mental layer of consciousness. It is all-knowing and your connection to the Source Consciousness of existence.

When we undergo hypnosis, we take ourselves into the subconscious mind which is where all our memories are stored. However, this is also the realm of lucid dreaming and the astral world. In lucid dreaming, we can mold the dream environment with our minds and co-create our reality in the dream in collaboration with the Higher-Self, or superconscious mind. We may also enter this level of mind during sleep paralysis. The question is whether what we experience in these higher dimensions of mind are real, or simply false imaginings. Does the astral realm actually exist or is it simply a mental creation?

Interestingly, EEG recordings of brain activity while in REM sleep (dreaming sleep) are very similar to EEG recordings while awake and alert.2 This leads to the obvious question: Is the dream experience in some way real and based on actual external stimuli coming from the “dream world”? In other words, is your consciousness experiencing things in another dimension, as real as this one, which your brain is temporarily tuned into? Science would say no, that this activity is not being produced by any external stimuli because there can be no external stimuli other than the physical world. The physical world is the only world that is objectively real, and therefore the only world that could possibly provide external stimuli to your senses. However, when we consider the reality and vividness of experiences like lucid dreams or alien abduction encounters, this scientific theory seems to be challenged. To show you the reality of the sensations in these other realms, here’s an account of a lucid dream experience followed by an account of a UFO/alien encounter:

“The grass felt like real grass. My skin felt like real skin. If I truly focused on something, like the ground, I could actually see the individual blades of grass and grains of sand. When awake, we consider seeing and touching as largely physical activities, but in lucid dreaming, I began to see that seeing and touching were also mental activities and equally real-seeming when consciously aware in the dream state.” 3

“Had vivid! dream with extraordinary! auditory and clear images, during the night…between 3:00 and 5:15 a.m. I dreamed I was walking outside when an extraordinary buzz-hum began. The sound was loud, riveting, and pervaded through my body, throwing me into a ‘void or mental isolation.’ The sound seeped into my ‘ordinary’ consciousness…a powerful sound. I looked up, and a huge, gray, metal [saucer-like] spaceship dropped straight down from the clouds on my right. I sat down on a ‘mesa’ cross-legged as it sank to earth. As I looked at it, it changed to a sphere on four legs with strange marks on it. Shortly thereafter, it lifted straight up and then began a curved flight in front of me and circled to my left. I yelled, ‘Hello, hello’ and it swooped in to look at me. Its force field was a tremendous, pushing, pressure against my body and was pushing me over, and I started to fall off the mesa. I asked it to ‘move away, I can’t keep my balance,’ and it came right up to my face in front of my eyes. I began to fall. ‘Don’t let me fall, don’t let me fall,’ I pleaded. I sensed it caught me, and I lost consciousness and blacked out in my dream! I woke up at 5:15 a.m. panting hard. I could still hear that powerful sound. I’ll never forget it or the extraordinary sensation. Somehow, I know that that is what they really sound like. The dream seemed real, more real than I want to admit. I’ve never had a dream like that! Never. So clear and lucid.”4

I think it’s a fair question to ask whether these experiences are actually real. They sure seem real to the percipients, as real as any event in the physical world anyway. Might they actually be real experiences in another dimension? To accept this proposition, we need a different model of brain functioning. The brain should be envisioned as a receiver and transmitter of conscious information. Sure, we can receive information (stimuli) from the physical world, but we can also receive stimuli from other worlds and dimensions. When we are dreaming or having an abduction encounter, our brains are tuned into the conscious information coming from this other, astral dimension. So, we are having a real conscious experience in another dimension which is being picked up by our brain in this dimension.

Further support for this multi-dimensional theory comes from shared experiences in an alternate reality. One great example is from Kim Carlsberg’s biographical book about her abduction experiences, Beyond My Wildest Dreams. In it, she describes an incident that occurred while camping with her friend Diane. After laying down to sleep in their tent, Kim describes: “I went to sleep, but when I opened my eyes I was standing erect, marveling at the Tolkienesque quality of the strange new world around me. The colors and forms could have only come from my imagination. But I was unquestionably awake and not imagining them.” 5 She describes herself as “positioned in the center of a courtyard outlined by monolithic rocks.” A shadow then came across the courtyard and she looked up to see a giant “mothership” UFO. Looking around, she also saw other people standing in the courtyard looking perplexed, as white light emanated from the underside of the craft. Out of this large ship, she watched as a smaller craft emerged from its bottom. Then she woke up. Excitedly, she told her friend Diane that she had had an amazing dream about a spaceship. Diane’s jaw dropped as she exclaimed that she also had a dream about a spaceship, and before telling each other any details they decided to separately draw exactly what they remembered. One stayed in place, while the other went to the other side of camp to make her drawing. When they were both done with their drawings they got back together and exchanged drawings. Kim remarks, “Our sketches were of the identical scout craft from different perspectives.”6 In her book you can see both sketches and they do show a near identical craft from two different angles, the design of which is distinctive.

The previous case clearly shows that while asleep, or in an altered state of consciousness, we may be having experiences in another dimension. These experiences, as in the previous example, can be objectively real—involving the simultaneous perception of events by two or more people. The brain may or may not be involved in the experience, but if it is, it is only in the sense that it mediates our experience, just as while awake in the physical world. That is, by picking up objectively real sensory stimuli and transmitting them to conscious awareness. The only difference is that the stimuli are not coming from the physical world, but from some other dimension.

It has always amused me how scientists can point to patterns of neural firing in the brain and say things like, “See here, we can stimulate this part of the brain and cause you to feel detached from your body, like you’re having an out-of-body experience. See, it’s just a certain pattern of neural firing that produces this illusion.” I’ll just ignore the fact that there have been documented OBEs while the person’s brain function was being monitored and shown to be non-active, or lacked electrical activity due to prolonged cardiac arrest.7 I want, instead, to point out the simple fact that all experience is associated with brain activity. If you want to say that OBEs aren’t real because there is sometimes associated brain activity with the experience, then you have to question any experience as being real because all experiences while alive are associated with brain activity. From the standpoint of brain as receiver/transmitter, the brain may well be picking up and processing the information and activity of your mind in the OBE or lucid state. However, that doesn’t mean your mind isn’t actually in an out-of-body state, or in another dimension in the lucid dream. Similarly, just because my brain is picking up and processing the information of the book I’m looking at or the apple I’m eating doesn’t mean that the book and apple don’t exist.

Still, some scientists, like Michael Persinger, believe they can stimulate the brain in such a way as to produce hallucinations, which may appear like an abduction, near-death experience, or other paranormal phenomenon. Failed parapsychologist Susan Blackmore underwent his procedure involving magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes. She reported,

“…Then it felt for all the world as though two hands had grabbed my shoulders and were bodily yanking me upright. I knew I was still lying in the reclining chair, but someone, or something, was pulling me up. Something seemed to get hold of my leg and pull it, distort it, and drag it up the wall. I felt as though I had been stretched half way up to the ceiling…”8

Other people reported various strange experiences when under Persinger’s magnetic stimulation, including vibrations in the body, vivid visual images, feeling detached from the body, sensing a presence, and odd tastes and smells.9 So, the argument goes, “See, we can produce these things by stimulating the brain and causing a certain activity in the brain. So, these abductions and people seeing ghosts and what not are just hallucinations caused by aberrant brain activity.”

Here’s the problem with this explanation. Yes, if the brain is a receiver and transmitter of conscious information, then by producing a certain pattern of energy in the brain, you could create sensations that are false, like the visual image of seeing a car accident. However, we all know that there really are car crashes. So, just because I can reproduce the energetic patterns in your brain artificially to cause the hallucination of a car crash doesn’t mean car crashes don’t really happen and are all illusions. So, all we can say is that magnetic stimulation can sometimes reproduce patterns of energy associated with certain sensations. It is a grave overstep to then say that the sensation in question is always produced by some abnormality in the brain, as opposed to a real stimuli from the environment.

What Susan Blackmore experienced is certainly interesting. It almost seems as if an actual entity was playing with her astral body, which she could sense in the altered state of consciousness she was in. Or then again, it could be a completely false recreation of such an event somehow created by the magnetic fields coursing through her brain. But to say then that there are no actual astral, or higher-dimensional, entities out there which can interact with our minds and bodies in higher dimensions is a gross error. Then, you would also have to say that if I had the sensation that I was tasting an apple under the influence of magnetic stimulation, all people who eat and taste apples are hallucinating or delusional. Of course this sensation can be falsely produced by recreating certain patterns of energy which are relayed by the brain to my conscious awareness, but there are real apples that also create these same energy patterns and sensations. I don’t think there’s any argument there. So, why can’t there be real astral entities and other dimensions?

The next materialistic theory that amuses me is the theory that abductees pick up information about aliens from movies and popular culture and then use those remembered images to conjure up false memories of abduction. One famous incident was the Barney and Betty Hill abduction. Days before undergoing hypnosis, a science fiction TV show featured a large-headed alien that was claimed to look similar to the one described by Barney Hill under hypnosis.10 The academics immediately jumped on this saying, “There you go, He used that image from the TV show and fabricated an abduction account around it while under hypnosis. Case closed.” Case not closed, I say. As David Jacobs observes, the alien featured in the show was a normal-sized guy wearing a jump-suit who had a larger head, but his eyes were his normal eyes. However, Barney described wraparound eyes and made the point that he had never seen eyes like that before. Furthermore, Betty stated that not only had they never seen the show, they had never even heard of it.

Regardless, this idea that people are just creating fantasies that seem real from borrowed elements of movies and popular culture is wholly an assumption, and a biased one based on a materialistic/atheistic viewpoint. In fact, it can be used to explain away any experience. Let’s say I saw a car crash yesterday, but you, being skeptical about whether there was actually a car crash assume that I must have made it up. Then you go through all of the TV programs of the last week and find one that featured a car crash with similar elements to the one I described. Then you say, “See, you just fantasized the crash based on this TV show that you saw, and even if you don’t remember seeing the show you probably did and just don’t consciously remember. However, you subconsciously remembered it and that subconscious information entered into the hallucination.” Well, the only flaw in the analogy is that a car crash occurs in the physical world, so we could just check the newspapers or police records to find out if it really did happen. If an event occurs in another dimension, such as an abduction, then unless we can tune our brains into that dimension, we can’t check whether or not the encounter is factual. We simply have to go on the congruency of reports. Are a number of widely separated people reporting similar details that check out? If, without leading the person, we get obscure details about the aliens or things they’ve seen when interacting with them which multiple abductees are telling us, then that is cause to ponder the reality of the experience. If we have such consistency, then it’s much more likely that the experience is objectively real. That, or they’ve all been watching the same TV show. However, as I’ve explained, you can find a parallel to just about anything on TV. Any experience could be shown to have a parallel in some TV show or movie, so the TV show borrowing hypothesis has very poor explanatory power.

Furthermore, as UFO abduction researcher David Jacobs explains, there has been great consistency and accuracy of reported abductions, including many elements that had never before been published in books or in the media when they were explored. To quote Jacobs on this:

“About 75% of the information I included in my 1992 book Secret Life had never been in the media or written about in even the most esoteric UFO literature. Yet, the abductees with whom I was working were describing procedures and events with remarkable accuracy and consistency that I, as the hypnotist and researcher, had never heard before, and of which neither I, nor the abductees, knew the meaning. The people who described these procedures and events so precisely were unaware that others were saying the same thing with the exact same details.”11

Other researchers report similar things. Abduction researcher John Mack, for instance, shows two drawings of the same probe-like instrument in his book Abduction.12In one drawing we see the instrument open and in the other it is closed. The instrument appears to be some sort of tube, to which is attached claw-like appendages and a round ball. In one drawing the claws are open and the ball suspended above, while in the other the claws are closed around the ball. The drawings were independently made by two different abductees he worked with. The logical conclusion is that they actually saw the same instrument during their respective abduction encounters. Then again, abduction research pioneer Budd Hopkins reports that he has never published certain symbols abductees have seen during abductions. He says that abductees have described “remarkably similar sets of symbols during abduction experiences.”13 He estimates that only about one in twenty abductees report these kinds of symbols, which he likens to an alien notation, or writing, system. However, the abductees who do report them report “extraordinarily similar images.” The reason he hasn’t published these symbols is because they offer an excellent way for him to “validate the testimony of people who recall abduction experiences.”

So, it’s starting to look like alien abductions are objectively real. We can’t study the phenomenon scientifically since it happens in another dimension.14 We instead have to rely on a new science of conscious experience. As I explain in my upcoming book, Enter the Light, this will be a science of direct, repeated human experience. It involves collecting reports of people’s experiences with a certain phenomenon, say alien abduction experiences, and analyzing those reports for commonalities and differences. Not just that, but we can examine the knowledge about reality that comes from the experience. After analyzing a sufficient number of cases, theories and hypothesis can be formulated and debated. This is the best way to study anomalous experiences. Look at the data, in this case reported anomalous experiences, and then theorize about it and try to map these other realms. Of course, experiencers can be interviewed, put under hypnosis to explore the memory more, or given survey questions to fill out. There is already the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (www.nderf.org) and its sister site for other anomalous experiences (www.oberf.org) that are set up to collect reports, and I have created my own website dedicated to collecting them (www.anomalousexperience.com). The more experiences we have of these other dimensions, the better we can understand consciousness and reality.

In order to understand why this is so valuable and important to undertake such research into peoples “hallucinations”, one needs to think in terms of a conscious universe with many dimensions. Your consciousness can have experiences in those other dimensions, which may incidentally be picked up by the brain if part of your mind is still connected to it. However, the brain is not a pre-requisite as consciousness can operate outside of the brain when the brain is non-functional.

Alien abductions, Lucid dreams, OBEs and NDEs are all examples of other dimensional experiences. Even during sleep paralysis, you may be partially awake but in an altered state of consciousness where you can perceive beings in a higher dimension. Sleep paralysis is the name for the experience of waking up from sleep, but being paralyzed and partially in an altered state of consciousness. Sleep paralysis victims feel unable to move and sometimes sense a presence in the room, or even see the presence. The paralysis of their body and sensed presence usually causes fear and sometimes they feel as if the presence is evil or pressing upon them, making it hard to breathe. However, not all encounters are frightful, and some may be quite pleasant. They may hear a voice, experience telepathic communication, or even have tactile contact with the being.15 Louis Proud, who has had numerous episodes of sleep paralysis, has seen and interacted with all kinds of entities during sleep paralysis, from alien greys to troll like beings.16 There’s even one entity that he’s seen and felt numerous times during sleep paralysis, who he calls Arnold. He believes, based on his extensive interactions with these beings, that they actually exist in the astral dimension, which he can see while in the altered state of consciousness related to sleep paralysis. In other words, the beings he has interacted with during sleep paralysis episodes seem like autonomous beings who act intelligently and have an independent existence from his own mind.

Sure, scientists can assume that he’s really in a dream-like state and what he’s experiencing has no independent existence, but that’s just an assumption. It’s an assumption based on a certain understanding of the world as the physical being real, and everything else hallucination. The typical scientific view of sleep paralysis is that we wake up paralyzed and this causes fear. So, our threat detection system goes into action and our brains try to make sense of our situation and identify the threat. Furthermore, we are still in an REM dream state of consciousness, even though we seem to be awake. Not being able to identify the threat, our minds “project images of our worst fears into the room, intensifying our fear even further as the Stranger takes form.”17

To me, it’s not a very good or satisfying explanation. One case in point is a sleep paralysis episode from Ryan Hurd’s book Sleep Paralysis. One night, Ryan was sleeping in the room of his fiancée’s deceased grandmother. He claims to have never met her, nor did he know much about her. Nevertheless, that night he woke up and felt a presence in the room. This presence sat down on the bed next to him. Ryan, of course, was fearful due to this unknown presence, but then remembered that his fiancée’s grandmother had died in the room he was sleeping in. Relaxing a little, but still nervous, he saw the presence stand in front of him holding a ream of papers close to her chest. Excitedly, she telepathically spoke to him, telling him that she had been doing research and writing stories. He asked her to show him and then he proceeded to have an out-of-body experience.18

The next day, he told his fiancée’s parents about “the dream,” and the fiancée’s mother got quiet. She told him “that her mother was, in fact, a writer in her youth but had to give up her dream of being a writer to raise a family. She had often spoken of all the stories in her head that she had never written down.”19 Apparently, in the after-life realm of the astral dimension, she was pursuing this long lost passion. Ryan had no idea that his fiancée’s grandmother had wanted to be a writer while alive. So, it seems that this was a real encounter with the spirit, or consciousness, of his fiancée’s grandmother. If scientists wish to say that he’s projecting a dream into the environment, then they have to ignore the evidence that he obtained accurate information which could be verified. Surely, in the annals of ghost sightings and interactions with other dimensional beings, many more accounts of verifiable information being obtained could be given. This suggests the reality of the encounters and provides evidence against the dreaming/hallucinating hypothesis. So, when one is in a sleep paralysis state, they are in an altered state of consciousness where they can perceive things in a higher dimension. We could say they are “tuned in” to another dimension. It’s the same for lucid dreams, OBEs and NDEs. The mind is perceiving and operating in a higher dimension.

The reason I can easily see this, and why scientists still don’t get it, is because my worldview is completely different from theirs. I believe in multiple dimensions and that consciousness is the base of all reality. Mind creates matter as well as all other dimensions. We live in a conscious multi-verse. There is a Source Mind which is the consciousness of ALL, and which manifests the various dimensions in collaboration with our conscious desires and intentions. Besides the physical dimension we regularly experience, there are multiple levels of the “astral”, which is a higher more thought-responsive realm, and there are probably many other physical realms as well. My mind is multi-layered, and the brain/body is the vehicle I inhabit to experience the physical world. My consciousness is free to enter and exit that vehicle, and shift into other-dimensional bodies for exploring the multi-verse. I, as an offshoot of the supreme intelligence (Source Mind), am one conscious being among quadrillions of others that populate this multi-verse and experience the richness of reality. Indeed, I look forward to my further adventures.

This view is 1 x 10200 times better than the view of science, that we live in a physical universe and everything else we might experience—everything we can’t “objectively” verify, like ghosts, interacting with alien beings, or shooting off to the stars during an OBE—is an illusion. Your brain produces consciousness, sometimes providing you with accurate experiences that correlate with actual external objective stimuli, but sometimes giving you “hallucinatory experiences” where your brain just tricks you into thinking you are seeing and experiencing something. It is an odd sort of brain that gives you the impression of interacting with intelligent beings who aren’t really there. This view of the world, though, is just so limiting. That my mind is forever tied down to my physical body, that there are no other dimensions or realms which I can experience, and that when I die that’s it—these propositions are not just unsettling, they are fundamentally contradicted by the evidence from people who have experienced their minds apart from their bodies and interaction with beings in other dimensions. Science can shoe these experiences under the rug and label them “hallucinations” all they want, but the people who experience them know better. All it takes to accept the reality of these kinds of experiences is a change in worldview, a fundamental change in thinking about the world. I invite you to make such a change.

Note: I don’t automatically discount the events of an abduction possibly occurring in the physical world. In my upcoming book, Enter the Light, I give a number of examples where it’s ambiguous which dimension the encounter takes place in and show how there is considerable evidence for crossover between dimensions.

This is a very simplified explanation of sleep paralysis, which is actually much more complex and varied. However, I’m focusing here on the sense of contact with another being which is a common occurrence. For a more detailed analysis of the features of sleep paralysis, see: Hurd, Ryan, Sleep Paralysis: A Guide to Hypnagogic Visions & Visitors of the Night. Los Altos: Hyena Press, 2011.

About the Author

Daniel Neiman holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He is currently an independent researcher with a focus on altered states of consciousness and life after death. He currently lives in Seoul, South Korea where he teaches English and researches in his spare time.

Comments

They have capture their plans foiled the colonization of new world order entities shall not occur the human race has the ability to choose and accept universal ethics and not sneaky means that our planet is ours we are superior they might be termed as lower forms of life the creator is self sustaining energy form transfer into the mystery world.

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